Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Chandrahas
Choudhury is a working novelist He wished to discuss the ways in
which novels work and his theme was: ten ways in which a novel can
change your life.

Novels
expand our awareness of sensual life. He read a passage from
Suite Française by
Nemirovsky to bolster his point. Through a cat's eyes we are made
aware of things beyond our ken. For instance, the sound of insect
wings.

Novels
teach us that many things happen, not for one reason, but for many
reasons. It may depend on small things. The
novel is by Asvagosha,called
Handsome Nanda illustrates this
point.

Novelists
give us a sense of ourselves, affected and modified by our landscape.
Taking Willa Cather's great novel, My Antonia, we
see the landscape of the prairie powerfully evoked by Jim
Borden, a 10-year old orphan.

Chandrahas Choudhury interacts with the audience in the Reading Room

Novels
clarify that there is no one
answer. There may be several answers, as in the Kurosawa film, Rasho
Mon. Truth is diverse and
multi-form. Orhan
Pamuk's novel My
Name is Red drives
home that point. A mystery surrounds a murder.

Novels
show much of our lives are lived in the imagination.
The
novel is Chekhov's The
Kiss.
A soldier in the novel has no wife, no experience of love or sensual
pleasure, nobody to go home to after the war. Something happens and
from that moment his mental life is transformed.

Novels
give us interiority, leaving behind our mind, and entering other
minds. No other form gives us as rich an understanding of human
motivations. The novel is V. Grossman's Everything
Flows. A
guest arrives: should the host and his wife take him in or not? There
are three minds at work, the narrator's, Nikolai's, and his wife's.
Readers have to be willing to enter and live up to the invitation, to
think.

The
private lives of human beings, the kind of knowledge that comes about
in the drama of our private lives is put in the open space in novels.
CC read from the
novel Santu
by Bibhuti Bhusan Bandhyopadyay, a great novelist of the 20th
century. One of the great pleasures of fiction is losing yourself in
someone else, here in the mind of a child.

Here's a fuller account ...

CC
is a working novelist He wished to discuss the ways in which novels
work and his theme was: for what purpose are you reading novels?
What's in a novel?

He
laid out his talk as ten ways in which a novel can change your life.
Novels don't preach a message. But you can benefit by reading novels
in a particular way, remaining alive to the ways in which they work
on us, the readers.

Specimen
1:Novels expand our awareness of sensual life. They can
make us use our sensual experience better. We see how much we are not
aware of in the real world.

It's
from Suite Française
by Nemirovsky. He was a Jew captured by the Nazis. He wrote at about
40 to 50 lines per page, wasting no space at all. The background is a
rich French family fleeing to the countryside as the Nazis as they
approach Paris. Albert, the cat in the novel is unconcerned by all
this tumult.. But the cat is excited abut the world around him.
Through his eyes we are made aware of things beyond our ken. For
instance, the sound of insect wings. But everything the cat is
watching is destroyed in one bomb burst.

Specimen
2: Novels teach us that many things happen, not for one
reason, but for many reasons. It may depend on small things.
Novels underscore the contingent nature of human existence.

The
novel is by Asvagosha, called Handsome Nanda.
It relates the story of a Buddhist monk by the half-brother who is
not interested in Buddha at all. He wants to see Buddha as a duty and
return at once to his wife. “Reverence for the Buddha drew Nanda
...”

Specimen
3: Novelist give us a sense of ourselves, affected and
modified by our landscape.

It's
Willa Cather's great novel, My Antonia. Jim Borden, a 10-year old,
recently orphaned, is journeying to live with his grandmother out in
the great plains of the West. “Continuously I shifted from under
the buffalo hide ...” The landscape Jim sees is powerfully evoked,
and he is affected by it, so far as to forget his loss.

There
are two landscapes prominent: city, country. You see it in War
and Peace,
in Crime and
Punishment.
You can experience it in Tagore's Home
and the World.

Specimen
4: There
is no one
answer. There may be
several answers, as in the Kurosawa film, Rasho Mon.
Truth is diverse and multi-form.

Orhan
Pamuk, whom CC considers the greatest novelist writing, wrote My
Name is Red.
The artist in the story is hit by a blunt instrument and found dead.
Mystery surrounds the incident. And 'Uncle' a character in the story
is about to have the meaning of life revealed by God, but he has lost
his hearing! At a critical moment the novel refuses to give an
answer.

Specimen
5: Much of a person's
life is lived in the imagination,
although we get a
picture of reality from newspapers and so on.

The
novel is Chekhov's The
Kiss.
A soldier in the novel has no wife, no experience of love or sensual
pleasure, nobody to go home to after the war. He is free. The
something happens to Ryabovitch to churn it all around. He is invited
to a masked ball, and has some leisure time. There he is kissed for
the first time by a woman, not anyone he knows. “Something strange
was happening to him ...” From that moment his mental life is
transformed. Nothing real has changed in his life. But one incident
opens out all the pleasures and dangers of the imagination.

Specimen
6: Novels give us interiority, leaving behind your mind, and entering
other minds. No
other form gives us an understanding of human motivations.

The
novel is V. Grossman's Everything
Flows.
A person is sent to Stalin's gulag for 30 years. When his time is up
he returns to Moscow, but does not recognise the city he grew up in.
He will go to a cousin, Nikolai, who is an establishment person. N's
wife dissuades Nikolai from hosting his cousin, for fear of others
watching and knowing they are harbouring an ex-prisoner. The passage
starts, “Nikolai Andreyvich was angry with his wife ...” and ends
“ forgiving his wife, he forgave himself.”

There
are three minds at work, the narrator's, Nikolai's, and his wife's.
In the tiny space of this passage you have many minds. We even listen
to a narrator thinking about a character's thinking. The novel has
faith in the reader, to complete the meaning. The novel is only made
known by the reader who reads it in a particular way. Readers have to
be willing to enter and live up to the invitation, to think.

Specimen
7: The private lives of human beings is put in the open space –
and we attain to the kind of knowledge that comes about through the drama of our own
private lives.

The
novel is Santu
by Bibhuti Bhusan Bandhyopadyay, a great novelist of the 20th
century. The passage chosen by CC begins, “ Santu wasn't at all
overjoyed about ...” Dadu and Santu have a rift. The genius of this
passage is what is left out. The bridge between the narrator and the
character is left out. One of the great pleasures of fiction is
losing yourself in someone else, here in the mind of a child. There
is a magic in erasing the boundary between things. The reader is
allowed for pages and pages to occupy other minds. You inhabit the
thoughts of other fictional people, no less real for being fictional.

Manu
Joseph does it in his novel Serious
Men.
“The country has become a video game ...”, he writes. It's comic
but not wholly comic. The dialogue is layered. The problem is not
acquiring or possessing someone. It is to figure out how to keep the
relationship going for 30 years to come.

CC was short of time and asked the participants to read the rest from his handout.

Posted by
Management - Learning from Experiences by Reflection
at
5:30 PM

1 comment:

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